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 Treatment and Exchange of Prisoners. 77

TREATMENT AND EXCHANGE OF PRISONERS.

Official Report of the History Committee of the Grand Camp, C. V., Department of Virginia.

By Hon. GEO. L. CHRISTIAN, Chairman.

Read at Wytheville, Va., October 23rd, 1 902.

The previous reports of the History Committee have been pub- lished in the Papers. They should be separately presented together in a special publication, as a logical defence of the South, in motive and that which ensued. The actuating principle is made clear and fully justified in morality by luminous presentation, which is impreg- nably honorable to the action of the Southern States and their people and soldiers throughout a momentous and necessitous struggle. A parallel in history, if ever approached in exemplification, cannot in all time, be more convincingly supported by facts in which the Southern people of both sexes offered and sacrificed in the cause of right and humanity.

To the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans of Virginia :

Your History Committee again returns its thanks to you, and the public, for the very cordial way in which you -have shown your appreciation of its labors, as contained in its last three reports. It may interest you to know, that whilst these reports have been pub- lished and scattered broadcast over this land, no attempt has been made to controvert or deny any principles contended for, or fact asserted, in any of them, so far as we have heard. We think we can, therefore, justly claim that these things have been established:

ist. That the South did not go to war to maintain, or to perpetuate , the institution of slavery.

2nd. The right of secession (the real issue of the war), and that this right was first asserted at the North, and as clearly recognized there as at the South.

jrd. That the North, and not the South, was the aggressor in bringing on the war.